VLC remotely control from C# - c#

i'm trying to control the VLC Media Player from C#. I tried getting a handle on the window with the FindWindow() command from .Net but as i found out the name of the window changes every time a file is played. The biggest problem i have is sending wm_commands to vlc..This approach worked with Winamp and Windows Media Player but with VLC it appears that it won't work.
I read that VLC can be controlled from a browser but i don't whant that...i've seen in it's settings that it has some hot keys that can be called..but they can be changed and if i call them from my code somehow...and the user changes them..bummer...
i'm a little bit stuck..any help would be fantastic...
Sorin

I have some code that is able to control it using sockets on the RC interface. This worked to a degree but has a lot of quirks. go to full screen seems to do nothing for a few seconds after play is invoked. Overall it sort of works.
The other options are:
Write a DirectDraw filter (very hard) but once this is done VLC can be used instead of or in conjunction with FFMPEG. Existing code that drives media player could use vlc.
Write an interop wrapper for libvlc, recently the VLC team split out libvlccore from libvlc so to the best of my knowledge all the interop is out of date. Once you write a wrapper you could embed vlc in a windows app. (if you need to support x64 you need to compile these libs under x64.
Look through the VLC code and find out if there is a way to send these windows messages.
EDIT This appears to have come out this week.

As Eoin mentioned, libvlc can be used to interact with VLC. As a C# user, you may want to try the .NET bindings offered by the libvlc-sharp project.
Edit: Seems like this project has not been maintained for years. I will leave the link anyway, in case you wish to take a look at it and maybe put some of its source to use.

Have you looked at libvlc
You might be able to wrap that up in a library and interact with VLC through that.

If what you are trying to do is control a previously running executable, check out the Process class to enumerate through all the current processes or do it by name. Check the executable to match vlc.exe. You can then get a handle to the main window and do some P/Invoke to send messages as you are doing with your other executables. This is obviously riddled with potential problems such as if the there are changes to the keyboard shotcuts.

How use libvlc in C++ http://unick-soft.ru/art/files/libvlcProject.zip
I think, use libvlc in C# very similar.

There's also the rc interface and even a telnet one: http://wiki.videolan.org/Console
However, I'd prefer libvlc if possible.

Related

Playing video in a .NET application

Lately, I've been trying to setup a media center PC. I've played around with all the common media center applications like XBMC, Plex, Boxee, and WMC. But all of them have one issue or another. So I was thinking about writing my own application from scratch.
My problem is I have no experience with developing software that plays media such as videos or music. I'm also not interested in spending a huge amount of time trying to figure this out, considering all the different file formats and codecs out there. I'm really more interested in developing the database and library interface for my application and reusing someone else's control or code for actually playing the media.
One option I was thinking was to just control an existing media player externally. So for example you may browse for a video to play in my application, and then when you hit play it would fire up VideoLAN or some other popular video player.
However, I was wondering if there was an easy way to play video inside a .NET application. I'm looking for something that is capable of playing a wide variety of formats such as MKV files, and DVD ISOs. I'm more experience with WinForms, but was also thinking about using this project as an opportunity to learn WPF.
i've spent many years looking at playing video under wpf.
The short answer
There is no easy way to guarantee to be able to play a variety of formats under wpf ( mkv,dvd etc etc ) or under windows for that matter.
the long answer
If you are looking just to run this at home and not release it, install all the codecs you need and most of the formats will run via mediaelement in wpf.
Getting all the codecs to cooperate can sometimes be frustrating.
Now moving into slightly harder territory.
if you want to play DVD then you need to replace mediaelement with wpfmediakit
http://wpfmediakit.codeplex.com/
wpfmediakit gives a base library to get access to the low level directshow functionality.
There is already a code base for playing DVDs based on wpfmediakit.
Now moving onto the very hard territory.
if you want to distribute your application and have users be able to "just watch" most/all media formats means you need to be able to completely control their codecs, which generally means distributing the codecs with your package and building the directshow filter graph in code rather than let windows build it.
The easiest way is to use the existing .Net hooks to Microsoft's standard MediaPlayer:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.media.mediaplayer.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd562851%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
was trying myself a while ago for something to play media in winforms, and found out there is vlc wrappers for .Net, dunno how good they are as i gave up, but you can try
here is one them:
http://vlcdotnet.codeplex.com/
Thanks for all the great answers. But just found out that VLC can actually be controlled through HTTP. So I think I'm just going to use that to point an instance of VLC running with the HTTP interface at whatever file I want to play.

FFPlay interface in C#?

I recently found a way to convert video's through the FFMpeg converter through command line, but ive recently been interested in making a video player! and i heard that VLC player and various other systems use FFPlay, and i dont know anything about it! so i have some main points of interest..
Questions:
What exactly does the ffplay.exe do?
If it allows me to stream videos, how would i create an interface to C# to use that
How would i display the video on a windows forms app.
If one of those is not possible, im welcome to other alternatives.. or even perhaps writing my own. Suggestions welcome! :)
Edit: im looking for possible solutions with a framework requirement of 3 or below, and also would perfer to not make them install anything additional to my program.
I am not expert but based on what I know,
You can perhaps look at DirectShow technology for developing your video player as there are managed lib such as directshow.net available for it.
To my knowledge, FFPlay is GUI on top of FFmpeg libraries - the main part of FFmpeg is audio/video codec library supporting many formats including MPEG-4 implementation.
To use FFmpeg via DirectShow, you need another component known as ffdshow.

Using webcam's button in my own program

My webcam has a button, with which you take a photo of current frame
when using it's original software what came with it when I bought it.
Is there any way to use that button to take photos in my program.
I would be using C#.
I was thinking of using Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) or avicap32
for using webcam in my software.
Any help would be appreciated. Where do I start?
EDIT:
I see that you didn't understand me. I need to know if my phisycal camera button is pressed.
I am using DigiMicro 1.3 camera (Manufacturer is DNT), which isn't really a webcam but a USB microscope, but
it behaves like a webcam.
Does the camera actually require that the software be running when you press the button? I know some webcams implement this feature at the driver level. If that's the case, I don't think there's much you can do without interacting directly with the USB port, which would be incredibly difficult and likely not worth the trouble. I can't find any technical documentation on the vendor's website with that kind of information.
The "MicroCapture" software doesn't come with any DLLs that have exported functions, so P/Invoking doesn't appear to be an option. Unfortunately, I can't get the driver installed, so I can't check if it comes with any P/Invoke-able DLLs.
Sorry, but since there's no standard interface for that kind of functionality and the vendor doesn't provide any specific information on it, I don't think this is possible. I would suggest contacting DNT directly about it. They may have some component that will do what you need.
This Coding4Fun post guides you through pretty much everything you need to do to get started using WIA, including adding the reference to a project, displaying the select a device dialog, and of course actually taking the picture :P.
Coding4Fun - Look at me! Windows Image Acquisition
I suggest that you take a look at the DirectShow.NET library. It has great functionality for capturing images/videos off connected devices. It also comes with several samples to get you started quickly.

Does XNA provide audio input (line in)?

Does XNA provide a means of audio input from the line-in? I looked at the MSDNA website but can't find anything on audio input. If it is indeed possible, a snippet of code or a tutorial website would be great.
Edit:
I need to do buffered reads from the audio-line in. I'm not so much interested in the implementation but rather if it has low latency.
Also development will be implemented into a PC only game.
I think all sound files need to be compiled by XACT before they can be used in XNA.
So either you get hold of DirectSound and look at the sample in:
\Samples\Managed\DirectSound\CaptureSound
...or you could interop with winmm.dll. This guy has made a small example of how to do it:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/audio-video/cswavrec.aspx
And this guy writes some more about enumerating all sound recording devices:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/Enum_Recording_Devices.aspx
Hope it helps!
Edit:
I'm not sure what you want to do with your audio stream so this tutorial might be of interest as well:
http://nyxtom.vox.com/library/post/recording-audio-in-c.html
Edit 2:
What he said (in the comment)
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V
If you're looking at doing a Windows only project, you could certainly capture the audio coming in with code from outside the XNA framework and play it back with the same. Because of how the XNA content manager works, you wouldn't be able to use the regular playback methods because the content manager translates everything into .xnb files at compile time and reads them from there. Nothing keeping you from playing using standard windows API calls though. You wouldn't really have an XNA project at that point, but I don't suppose the distinction is all that important since you're not looking to be compatible with the other platforms anyway.
To answer your question, no, you can't access audio line-in through the XNA APIs. You'd have to look at some other library such as Port Audio that would give you access to features like that. But then you'd be restricted to running on windows (ie. no xbox or zune).
disclaimer: not sure if port audio specifically has this functionality as I just found it quickly via google. Was just trying to illustrate that you'd have to use some other API.

Embedding Flash Player in a C++ or Java application?

I would like to embed Flash Player directly inside a C++ or Java application.
I found an article that describes how to do this for C#:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/stock_history03.html
Unfortunately, I have no experience with C#, COM or ActiveX. I need someone to translate this code to C++, allowing me to embed the Flash Player into a Win32 Window. Ultimately I'd like to use this information to embed Flash into a Java application.
I am looking for three main functionalities:
Ability to play a Flash movie
Ability to receive events (such as mouse clicks)
Ability to send events
Edit: I prefer an open-source solution if possible.
I don't know how to embed flash in C++, but Christopher Deckers (of SWTSwing fame) has developed an interesting hack which allows it to be embedded in Java. You can find more information in the Javalobby announcement thread.
Here is an updated link: https://github.com/Chrriis/DJ-Native-Swing
I gave the same answer not long ago. Check out SWHX:
http://haxe.org/com/libs/swhx
http://code.google.com/p/screenweaver-hx/
http://code.google.com/p/screenweaver-hx/source/browse/trunk/src/np_host.c
Cheers!
Juan
If it has to be open source I'd consider Gnash, an open source flash implementation.
It works on all major platforms, supports most multimedia codecs and is supposed to be embeddable in applications through nsapi.
If you want to go with a commercial solution, I'd recommend Scaleform GFx. It's not cheap, though, but it's damn good.
One simple way to create a Flash player in your window: AtlAxCreateControlEx.
To receive and send events, you will need a sink: AtlAdvise. You will need to define the functions receiving events on the ActionScript (i.e. Flash) side too.
What you should use is Netscape Plugin API. It's native and it's what all the good browsers use to load flash player plugin. While the actual flash player is not open source, this API is.
If you're not gonna ship a copy of flashplayer with your app:
Your app should check at runtime for flash player and should alert the user if it doesn't find it (usually by giving a link to Adobe to download it).
Flashplayer plugin is usually installed at %AppData%\Mozilla\plugins on Windows.
Take a look at FlashDX. It is open-source and free.
I personally haven't tried this but say in case of SWT/Java you could embed SWT browser window in you SWT/Java application and in the browser view you could put content with flash content, then communicate say with Merapi bridge with flash movie and java.

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